Large Deviations of Branching Random Walks

A branching random walk consists of a population of individuals each of whom perform a random walk step before giving birth to a random number of offspring and dying. The offspring then perform their own independent random steps and branching. I will present classic results on the convergence of the empirical particle measure to the Gaussian distribution, then present new results on large deviations of this empirical measure. The talk will be self-contained and can serve as an introduction to both the branching random walk and large deviation theory. The format will be 40 minutes of introduction and presentation, followed by a short break and then 20 minutes of discussion of open problems for those interested.